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Society of Actuaries (SOA) President-Elect Jim Glickman will provide an update on the SOA 2017-2021 Strategic Plan and recent developments. Join us as he shares insights on key programs from the organization.​

Jim Glickman

Shane Barnes

Afternoon General Session4:00PM - 5:00PM

Changing Healthcare: How can we harness Predictive Analytics for Patients, Providers & Payers?

Healthcare budgets in most countries seem to be out of control, with the U.S. heading to 20% of GDP and other countries not far behind in terms of rapidity of increases.

Recently, predictive analytics, big data and artificial intelligence have been proposed as a solution that will enable practitioners to identify high risk populations and conditions earlier and intervene more effectively with patients.

Is this hope justified or is it another example of misplaced optimism? What will it take for predictive analytics to make a significant impact on the cost and value of healthcare?

We propose that three factors are required to work together to effect transformation: Payment Reform; Predictive Analytics and Behavioral Economics. In the future, more risk will be transferred to providers and consumers of healthcare services. As risk professionals, actuaries will be a significant contributor to this transformation.

​The Affordable Care Act has transformed the health insurance market since the Exchanges were launched in January, 2014. The panel will give a history of how the ACA has impacted medical and dental insurance, including the impact to rates and plan designs, and the shifts in the underlying markets and risk pools.

​The panel will also describe how Connecticut’s individual exchange, AccessHealthCT, has evolved, discuss the uncertainty that carriers have faced during the first five years of the ACA, and look ahead to how the ACA may evolve in the years ahead.

An overview of updates with regard to the latest employee benefits legislation and case law affecting defined benefit plans, including current developments from the Internal Revenue Service, Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, and tax reform.

​Bruce will also provide an update about trends that have been prevalent so far in 2018 in the defined benefit realm, and what we might expect to see moving forward.

This session is a call to action to value our scarcest resource as a means to unleash our full power as actuaries and people. Our goal is to have a fun and impactful conversation about the value of time relative to other resources at our disposal and to lay a foundation for how we liberate our professional and personal time.

​We will discuss principles for liberating time, how they connect with strategies to apply at work, and finally tactical enablers for all of us to execute on those strategies.

Even as interest rates have been rising, life insurers are still under pressure from the low interest rate environment. The life-annuity industry has shifted its asset allocations to try to reduce the effects of the low rate environment, but industry yields continue to decrease. This presentation will cover highlights from Conning’s recent strategic study: “Life Insurance Industry Investments – Book Yields Flattening as Rates Rise”, in which industry asset portfolio trends for the period 2013 – 2017 were examined.

In addition to broad industry trends, the difference between insurers in terms of allocation and investment results will be covered, showing the effects of differences in size as well as choices in allocation among various asset classes. In addition, a look at insurers with outlier allocations will be discussed, in terms of whether these extreme allocations led to noticeably different investment results.

There has been significant discussion and promotion of the promise of artificial intelligence and machine learning applications in healthcare. Some of the traditional functions performed by actuaries could be performed by data scientists or other professionals in the future.

While these techniques and professionals have a significant role to play, there is considerable scope for the application of traditional statistical techniques. This talk will cover some specific applications of traditional methods, including logistic regression and survival analysis, and, where appropriate, comparisons with machine learning techniques.

Jim Glickman will share his insights on the long-term care (LTC) industry, including recent developments with LTC insurance.

Jim is the president and CEO of LifeCare Assurance Company, a long-term care (LTC) reinsurer, which he helped found in 1988. Prior to that, Glickman spent 16 years working at four other insurance companies in product development and reinsurance roles.

He was the founding chairperson of the SOA’s Long Term Care Insurance Section and served as its chairperson two additional years. Since its formation in 2005, he has served as executive director of the Intercompany Long-Term Care Insurance Conference Association, Inc. (ILTCI)

This session will cover a range of professionalism topics, from the Code of Conduct to Qualification Standards to Actuarial Standards of Practice.

However, the approach to learning will involve some fun and games! Participants are encouraged (but not required) to review professionalism documents in advance, to increase their chances of winning! It might be the most fun you’ve ever had getting some professionalism CE credit!

RRC worked with the SOA and the AAA on a study regarding underwriting methodologies and their impact on mortality experience using the Delphi Method, with a particular interest on accelerated underwriting. The objectives of this study, which included thirty-three experts from sixteen life insurance companies, three consultant companies and six reinsurance companies, were to:

Identify and define the current and emerging methodologies used by companies to underwrite policies that will have a material or meaningful impact on anticipated mortality;

Categorize the above methodologies in a way to facilitate the measurement of their impact on anticipated mortality;

Estimate the impact of the categories of methodologies on estimated future mortality relative to standard industry experience tables;

In this session, variable annuity mergers and acquisitions practitioners will discuss the variable annuity M&A landscape. Themes covered will be buyer and seller motivations, deal analytics and economics, the role of actuaries in the M&A process, and future outlook for transactions.

Insurtech is a rapidly growing sector that is driving innovation across all sectors of the insurance industry by embracing the newest technology to rethink customer journeys and the insurance value chain. The resulting business models can often run into conflicts with traditional product design.

​In this panel discussion, we will explore how actuaries working in the Insurtech space have adjusted the way they approach product innovation to succeed in this new world.